Watching the Worlds Go By / An American Indian teenager finds herself caught between modern and ancient beliefs

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, May 17, 1998

POWER

Linda Hogan's new novel, "Power," is both a small story and a very large one.

The author of the poetry collection "Book of Medicine" (a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist) and the novel "Mean Spirit" (a Pulitzer finalist) has written a book small in breadth -- characters are few, setting is restricted to a small area in the swamplands of Florida, and there's really only one event, to which all the other events in the story are a response. But its profundity is great: This is a book about losing and regaining the living world.

The narrator is a 16-year-old girl, one of the few remaining members of the Taiga tribe. Her name is Omishto, which means "one who watches" -- a description both of her character and her role in the story. "I watch everything," she says, "and see deep into what's around me. I have a strong wind inside me, is what Grandma said. A wind with eyes . . . I feel lives and spirits in the woods, and I see the growing things."

What Omishto sees -- the event on which her fate hinges -- is the killing of a panther, an animal sacred to the Taiga and endangered under U.S. law. Paradoxically, the killer is another Taiga, Ama, a strong, wise woman and a second mother to Omishto since childhood. Why would Ama, to whom panthers are of vital spiritual importance, hunt one down and shoot it? This is the question Omishto is left with, and the answer carries her out of one life and into another.

Two worlds hold power over her: the man-made, modern world with its highways and schools and laws, and the ancient world of the Taigas, represented by the elders of the clan. Both are in trouble. The world of the white people seems dead at its heart, and the world of her people has been battered and diminished. Everything is out of balance, and Omishto comes to understand -- as Ama is tried by two courts -- that the killing of the panther was wrong and right, a sacrifice necessary to restore the balance.

Hogan uses her skills as a poet here to cast a potent spell. Her sentences, full of vivid images and often composed of long, rhythmic phrases, have an incantatory, dreamlike sound. "This is the place where clouds are born," the novel begins, "and I am floating. Last night, before I fell asleep in my boat, the earth was bleeding. The red light that began at the edge of earth moved upward until all the sky was red. Mama calls it stormlight, and this morning as I sit back in the boat, it looks like she is right; a storm is coming in. I watch the clouds form. They are high above me, heavy and dark, and they are fast, traveling across the sky."

The story begins with a hurricane that uproots trees, tears houses apart and sends animals flying. To Omishto it seems as if the earth has been ripped open. Though Omishto is a girl of the present day -- she goes to school and lives with her mother, who wishes to pass for a white woman, and her mother's husband, who looks at her with a predatory eye -- "Power" is not really about her. Omishto is not meant as a realistic portrait of a teenage girl; she is the voice of the earth's dilemma at a precarious moment, as roads and buildings strangle nature like the kudzu vines that threaten the swampy forests of the Taigas' traditional home. "The world has grown small where Sisa (the panther) lives," Omishto observes. "It has lost its power and given way to highways and streets of towns where once there were woods and fens and bodies of water. The world is made less by these losses. Because of this, humans have lost the chance to be whole and joyous, reverent and alive. They live in square lots, apart even from one another. What they've forgotten is large and immense, and what they remember is only a small, narrow hopelessness."

It is a familiar vision and may seem oversimplified -- the destructive ways of the white man against the whole, harmonious ways of native peoples -- but Hogan's language and the complexity of her imagery take it beyond cliche.

"Power" moves more like a poem or a song than a novel, circling around and around its themes, deepening them with repetition and coming to rest on a note of hope as Omishto chooses her place in the world.